What’s at
stake: Population growth
was claimed as a significant danger to the planet by Paul and Anne Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968), which was falsely
represented in the mass media. Population
and warming/climate change were connected as early as 1975 by the Republican
Ford Administration in NSS Memorandum 200, which was suppressed. Little
attention has been given to these
connections by the mass media, and strong business and religious denial has
also silenced official and public discussion and action. Now at last, strengthened by books and
articles like that of Alan Weisman’s Countdown,
which give comprehensive analysis (population numbers and consumption), significant
progress can be made against the harms of population growth.

Population Connection Magazine of
Population Connection (formerly ZPG)

NARAL

CHALLENGE

Angus and Butler, Too
Many People? A Review by Bill Hopwood
(stresses negative effects of consumption, class prejudice against the
poor, capitalism)

Contact President Obama

Contents 1-3

CONDITION
OF THE WORLD

Earth
Control: Countdown by Alan Weisman.

Rev. in NYTBR ByNATHANIEL
RICH. Published: October 11, 2013

If we wanted to bring about the
extinction of the human race as quickly as possible, how might we proceed? We
could begin by destroying the planet’s atmosphere, making it incapable of
supporting human life. We could invent bombs capable of obliterating the entire
planet, and place them in the hands of those desperate enough to detonate them.
We could bioengineer our main food sources — rice, wheat and corn — in such a
way that a single disease could bring about catastrophic famine. But the most effective measure,
counterintuitive as it may be, would be to increase our numbers. Population
is what economists call a multiplier. The more people, the greater the
likelihood of ecological collapse, nuclear war, plague.

Pablo
Amargo

COUNTDOWN

Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

By Alan Weisman

513 pp.
Little, Brown & Company. $28. 2013

As Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on
our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations
estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have
calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live
at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably
— would be 1.5 billion.

Weisman’s jeremiad amounts to a world tour of our overpopulation
misery. He begins in Jerusalem, where he learns
that construction firms worry about running out of sand, despite the fact that
half of Israel
is a desert. Water is in short supply, too. Because of agricultural irrigation,
the Jordan River is now a “fetid ditch”;
pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been
baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely
vomit.

Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate
(about seven births per woman), maintained in part by the persistence of human
slavery. The Philippines
have a glut of fishermen, but are running out of fish. Pakistan
is set to become the world’s fourth-most-populous nation by 2050. “We’re
praying that Pakistan
only doubles,” the director of a Pakistani health organization says. “We are a
crowded, underdeveloped nation — more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more
illiterates, more youths without productive jobs and more chaos.”

The question mark that ends the book’s
subtitle is as significant as what precedes it. If we dramatically reduce the
planet’s human population, we might have a future here. Then again, it might
already be too late.
Weisman raises the example of the passenger pigeon. During the 19th century it
was one of the most abundant birds on earth, with as many as five billion in America alone.
The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914, but it was doomed long before then,
even as it still numbered in the millions, since its habitat and food supply
had already dwindled beyond sustenance level. “Was it possible,” Weisman
writes, “that my own species might also already be the living dead?”

“Countdown” is a bleak sequel to “The World Without Us,” Weisman’s
elegant account of what would happen to the planet should human beings suddenly
vanish. That book drew its subtle and visceral power from Edenic descriptions
of an Earth reclaimed by its forests and oceans, healing from the wounds
inflicted by civilization. With its imaginative force and vivid storytelling,
it had the power of the best speculative fiction; but in “Countdown,” “there’s
no imagining.”

Perhaps motivated by the urgency of his theme, or frustration over
the intransigence of the problem, Weisman abandons subtlety in favor of making
his message — we need to slow our rate
of procreation, if we want to survive — explicitly and didactically in
every chapter. His dire warnings, and the warnings of the scientists and
government officials he interviews, are unrelenting, with variations of the
following sentence appearing at regular intervals: “In the entire history of
biology, every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population
crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.”

Weisman visits more than 20 countries and interviews countless
local scientists, families and policy directors, but the problem is always the
same: There are too many people. The culprits
are modern medicine, which has caused life expectancy in the last two centuries
to nearly double; innovations in agronomy, which have dramatically increased
global food production; and a failure to provide contraception to women.

From Thomas Malthus to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of “The
Population Bomb” (1968), population doomsayers have endured ridicule and
vilification, largely because their predictions of imminent doom fail to
materialize on schedule. In our own time, there are a few mitigating
indicators. Much of the current population growth comes in the developing
world, where carbon consumption remains low, so the environmental effect is
relatively muted. The next thousand Americans will do more than twice as much
damage as the next hundred thousand Nigeriens, though that is hardly a cause
for celebration.

Perhaps more significantly, the global fertility rate has declined every year since 1965, from
nearly five births per woman to 2.4. The problem is that anything above 2.33 —
the rate at which births equal deaths, when child mortality is ­factored in —
will yield a population expansion. Even when fertility drops below the ­replacement
rate, it will take decades for the population to begin to decline. At today’s
rate, world population would stabilize at 10
billion by 2100. But that will most likely never happen, Weisman writes,
because seven billion people “are
already turning the atmosphere into something ­unlivable.”

The grim prophecies are illustrated with statistics. Each year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt;
by 2040, China
will have more than 100 million 80-year-olds. We add another million people
every four and a half days. But statistics fail to tell the entire story.
Weisman’s problem — and the problem of all those who warn about overpopulation
or, for that matter, the correlative dangers of ecological devastation — is a
problem of imagination. Not Weisman’s imagination. Ours. As one scholar says in
“Countdown,” “most people’s minds go blank after 100,000.” Large numbers are
difficult to visualize. Numbers are even more difficult tofeel.

Metaphors bring us closer. Over the course of the book, man is
likened to a cancer; to “a voracious monoculture” that sucks “resources in at
the cost of the rest of life on the planet”; and to the mule deer of Arizona’s Kaibab
Plateau, an example of a species once “doomed to ­overpopulate.”

But the book’s most indelible image comes from Weisman’s visit to Japan, where
the fertility rate is so low — 1.4 children per female — that the population
has been declining since 2006. This might make Japan something of a best-case
situation, but an aging population means there are too many senior citizens,
and not enough young people to take care of them. Already Japan has a
shortage of geriatric nurses. Weisman visits NagoyaSciencePark,
where Japan’s
oldest scientific firm has built RIBA II, a robotic white bear designed to
carry elderly people around the house. It has large, widely-spaced black eyes,
cute little ears and a painted smile.

“I will do my best,” says the bear, as it approaches a man who is
lying on a hospital bed. “I will carry you as though you were a princess.”

RIBA II slides one paw under the patient’s knees, the other
beneath his back. The robot cradles the man in its arms. It carries the man
across the room, and lowers him tenderly into a wheelchair.

“I’m finished,” announces RIBA II, and it’s hard not to wonder
whether the robot speaks for us all.

Nathaniel Rich’s new
novel is “Odds Against Tomorrow.”

A
version of this review appears in print on October 13, 2013, on pageBR18of
theSunday Book Reviewwith the headline: Earth Control.

Rising CO2
Levels Will Make Staple Crops Less Nutritious By Todd Datz, EcoWatch, 11 May 14.

At the elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
anticipated by around 2050, crops that provide a large share of the global
population with most of their dietary zinc and iron will have significantly
reduced concentrations of those nutrients, according to a new study led byHarvard School of
Public Health(HSPH). Given that an estimated 2
billion people suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies—resulting in a loss of 63
million life years annually from malnutrition—the reduction in these nutrients
represents the most significanthealththreat ever shown to be associated withclimate change.

“This study is the first to resolve the question of whether
rising CO2 concentrations—which have been increasing steadily since the
Industrial Revolution—threaten human nutrition,” saidSamuel Myers, research scientist in the
Department of Environmental Health at HSPH and the study’s lead author. The
study appears online May 7 inNature.

Some previous studies of crops grown in greenhouses and
chambers at elevated CO2 had found nutrient reductions, but those studies were
criticized for using artificial growing conditions. Experiments using free air
carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) technology became the gold standard as FACE
allowed plants to be grown in open fields at elevated levels of CO2, but those
prior studies had small sample sizes and have been inconclusive.

The researchers analyzed data involving 41 cultivars
(genotypes) of grains and legumes from the C3 and C4 functional groups (plants
that use C3 and C4 carbon fixation) from seven different FACE locations in Japan, Australia
and the U.S.
The level of CO2 across all seven sites was in the range of 546 to 586 parts
per million (ppm). The researchers tested the nutrient concentrations of the
edible portions of wheat and rice (C3 grains), maize and sorghum (C4 grains),
and soybeans and field peas (C3 legumes).

The results showed a significant decrease in the
concentrations of zinc, iron and protein in C3grains. For example, zinc,
iron and protein concentrations in wheat grains grown at the FACE sites were
reduced by 9.3 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.3 percent, respectively, compared
with wheat grown at ambient CO2. Zinc and iron were also significantly reduced
in legumes; protein was not.

The finding that C3 grains and legumes lost iron and zinc
at elevated CO2 is significant. Myers and his colleagues estimate that 2
billion to 3 billion people around the world receive 70 percent or more of
their dietary zinc and/or iron from C3 crops, particularly in the developing
world, where deficiency of zinc and iron is already a major health concern.

C4 crops appeared to be less affected by higher CO2, which
is consistent with underlying plant physiology, as C4 plants concentrate CO2
inside the cell for photosynthesis, and thus they might be expected to be less
sensitive to extracellular changes in CO2 concentration.

The researchers were surprised to find that zinc and iron
varied substantially across cultivars of rice. That finding suggests that there
could be an opportunity to breed reduced sensitivity to the effect of elevated
CO2 into crop cultivars in the future.

In addition to efforts to reduce CO2emissions, breeding
cultivars with reduced sensitivity to CO2, biofortification of crops with iron
and zinc, and nutritional supplementation for populations most affected could
all play a role in reducing the human health impacts of these changes, said
Myers. “Humanity is conducting a global experiment by rapidly altering the
environmental conditions on the only habitable planet we know. As this experiment
unfolds, there will undoubtedly be many surprises. Finding out that rising CO2
threatens human nutrition is one such surprise,” Myers said.

“We are the largest grassroots
population organization in the United
States.Population Connection, a 501(c)(3)
organization, has 140,000 members, supporters, ...

POPULATION CONNECTION, THE MAGAZINE OF THE
ORGANIZATION BY THE SAME NAME

JUNE
2014 NUMBER ON FOOD SCARCITY, “OUR AGRICULTRUAL FUTURE IN PERIL.”

Like Countdown, the
magazine is packed with striking statistics, for example: “Costs for voluntary contraception are
amazingly modest. Right now, the global
health community needs an additional $4 billion dollars a year to be able to
provide contraception to the 222 million women with a current unmet need. That’s equal to Coca-Cola’s annual marketing
budget or the value of the Internet music program Spotify.” This number includes “Our Last, Best Hope for
a Future on Earth?” by Weisman, “New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed
Civilizations” by Lester Brown, and “Famine Is a Feminist Issue” by Lisa
Palmer. –Dick

IPCC REPORT ON FOOD SECURITY

The March 2914 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change makes several significant predictions, among them:

--“Studies have documented a large negative sensitivity of crop
yields to extreme daytime temperatures around 30 Degree C”

--“Changes in temperature and precipitation, without considering
effects of C02, will contribute to increased global food prices by 2050, with
estimated increases ranging from 3-84 percent.”—Dick from PC p. 2.

--

·

We are made up of pro-choice women and men across the United States.
Together, we protect a woman's right to choose.

Make a contribution to support choice today. With your help we can
continue to protect reproductive rights.

$35.00$50.00$75.00$100.00other:

Donations secured by

PRO-CHOICE VOTER GUIDE

Find
out where candidates for Congress and governor stand on choice! Our voter guide
includes candidates for primary elections across the country.

“POPULATION GROWTH NOT THE ONLY
DECISIVE FACTOR” By George Monbiot.(2011)

See Chapter 17, Section ii. “Jasper
Ridge,” on Paul and Anne Ehrlich and other population scholars who read the Ehrlichs’ The Population Bombcarefully. According
to Weisman, their book warned of famines from overpopulation “unless…dramatic
programs to increase food production stretched the Earth’s carrying capacity.” Thanks to Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution miracle
hybrids and nitrogen fertilizer from oil the famines predicted for the 1970s were
averted. But the Ehrlichs also wrote in their book that such programs would be only
temporary “unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at
population control.” AND Borlaug made
the same warning “in his Nobel acceptance speech that Green Revolution crops
were only buying the world time, unless population controls were implemented.” (402).

And see Weisman pp.
404-5 where he quotes the Paul Ehrlich on the importance of consumption. “’Yet to separate consumption from
population. . .is like saying the length of a rectangle contributes more to its
area than its width.’” (405). Hence “the
most overpopulated country on Earth” is the US (404).

I recommend all of
Chapter17 for setting the record straight about Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

From the White House: Write or Call

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public, through our website.

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Population Connection Magazine of
Population Connection (formerly ZPG)

NARAL

CHALLENGE

Angus and Butler, Too
Many People? A Review by Bill Hopwood (adds consumption, class prejudice against the
poor, capitalism)

Contact President Obama

Contents 1-3

CONDITION
OF THE WORLD

Earth
Control: Countdown,’ by Alan Weisman.

Rev. in NYTBR ByNATHANIEL
RICH. Published: October 11, 2013

If we wanted to bring about the
extinction of the human race as quickly as possible, how might we proceed? We
could begin by destroying the planet’s atmosphere, making it incapable of
supporting human life. We could invent bombs capable of obliterating the entire
planet, and place them in the hands of those desperate enough to detonate them.
We could bioengineer our main food sources — rice, wheat and corn — in such a
way that a single disease could bring about catastrophic famine. But the most effective measure,
counterintuitive as it may be, would be to increase our numbers. Population
is what economists call a multiplier. The more people, the greater the
likelihood of ecological collapse, nuclear war, plague.

Pablo
Amargo

COUNTDOWN

Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

By Alan Weisman

513 pp.
Little, Brown & Company. $28. 2013

As Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on
our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations
estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have
calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live
at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably
— would be 1.5 billion.

Weisman’s jeremiad amounts to a world tour of our overpopulation
misery. He begins in Jerusalem, where he learns
that construction firms worry about running out of sand, despite the fact that
half of Israel
is a desert. Water is in short supply, too. Because of agricultural irrigation,
the Jordan River is now a “fetid ditch”;
pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been
baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely
vomit.

Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate
(about seven births per woman), maintained in part by the persistence of human
slavery. The Philippines
have a glut of fishermen, but are running out of fish. Pakistan
is set to become the world’s fourth-most-populous nation by 2050. “We’re
praying that Pakistan
only doubles,” the director of a Pakistani health organization says. “We are a
crowded, underdeveloped nation — more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more
illiterates, more youths without productive jobs and more chaos.”

The question mark that ends the book’s
subtitle is as significant as what precedes it. If we dramatically reduce the
planet’s human population, we might have a future here. Then again, it might
already be too late.
Weisman raises the example of the passenger pigeon. During the 19th century it
was one of the most abundant birds on earth, with as many as five billion in America alone.
The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914, but it was doomed long before then,
even as it still numbered in the millions, since its habitat and food supply
had already dwindled beyond sustenance level. “Was it possible,” Weisman
writes, “that my own species might also already be the living dead?”

“Countdown” is a bleak sequel to “The World Without Us,” Weisman’s
elegant account of what would happen to the planet should human beings suddenly
vanish. That book drew its subtle and visceral power from Edenic descriptions
of an Earth reclaimed by its forests and oceans, healing from the wounds
inflicted by civilization. With its imaginative force and vivid storytelling,
it had the power of the best speculative fiction; but in “Countdown,” “there’s
no imagining.”

Perhaps motivated by the urgency of his theme, or frustration over
the intransigence of the problem, Weisman abandons subtlety in favor of making
his message — we need to slow our rate of
procreation, if we want to survive — explicitly and didactically in every
chapter. His dire warnings, and the warnings of the scientists and government
officials he interviews, are unrelenting, with variations of the following
sentence appearing at regular intervals: “In the entire history of biology,
every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a
crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.”

Weisman visits more than 20 countries and interviews countless
local scientists, families and policy directors, but the problem is always the
same: There are too many people. The
culprits are modern medicine, which has caused life expectancy in the last two
centuries to nearly double; innovations in agronomy, which have dramatically
increased global food production; and a failure to provide contraception to
women.

From Thomas Malthus to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of “The
Population Bomb” (1968), population doomsayers have endured ridicule and
vilification, largely because their predictions of imminent doom fail to
materialize on schedule. In our own time, there are a few mitigating
indicators. Much of the current population growth comes in the developing
world, where carbon consumption remains low, so the environmental effect is
relatively muted. The next thousand Americans will do more than twice as much
damage as the next hundred thousand Nigeriens, though that is hardly a cause
for celebration.

Perhaps more significantly, the global fertility rate has declined every year since 1965, from
nearly five births per woman to 2.4. The problem is that anything above 2.33 —
the rate at which births equal deaths, when child mortality is ­factored in —
will yield a population expansion. Even when fertility drops below the ­replacement
rate, it will take decades for the population to begin to decline. At today’s
rate, world population would stabilize at 10
billion by 2100. But that will most likely never happen, Weisman writes,
because seven billion people “are
already turning the atmosphere into something ­unlivable.”

The grim prophecies are illustrated with statistics. Each year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt;
by 2040, China
will have more than 100 million 80-year-olds. We add another million people
every four and a half days. But statistics fail to tell the entire story.
Weisman’s problem — and the problem of all those who warn about overpopulation
or, for that matter, the correlative dangers of ecological devastation — is a
problem of imagination. Not Weisman’s imagination. Ours. As one scholar says in
“Countdown,” “most people’s minds go blank after 100,000.” Large numbers are
difficult to visualize. Numbers are even more difficult tofeel.

Metaphors bring us closer. Over the course of the book, man is
likened to a cancer; to “a voracious monoculture” that sucks “resources in at
the cost of the rest of life on the planet”; and to the mule deer of Arizona’s Kaibab
Plateau, an example of a species once “doomed to ­overpopulate.”

But the book’s most indelible image comes from Weisman’s visit to Japan, where
the fertility rate is so low — 1.4 children per female — that the population
has been declining since 2006. This might make Japan something of a best-case
situation, but an aging population means there are too many senior citizens,
and not enough young people to take care of them. Already Japan has a
shortage of geriatric nurses. Weisman visits NagoyaSciencePark,
where Japan’s
oldest scientific firm has built RIBA II, a robotic white bear designed to
carry elderly people around the house. It has large, widely-spaced black eyes,
cute little ears and a painted smile.

“I will do my best,” says the bear, as it approaches a man who is
lying on a hospital bed. “I will carry you as though you were a princess.”

RIBA II slides one paw under the patient’s knees, the other
beneath his back. The robot cradles the man in its arms. It carries the man
across the room, and lowers him tenderly into a wheelchair.

“I’m finished,” announces RIBA II, and it’s hard not to wonder
whether the robot speaks for us all.

Nathaniel Rich’s new
novel is “Odds Against Tomorrow.”

A
version of this review appears in print on October 13, 2013, on pageBR18of
theSunday Book Reviewwith the headline: Earth Control.

Rising CO2
Levels Will Make Staple Crops Less Nutritious By Todd Datz, EcoWatch, 11 May 14.

At the elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
anticipated by around 2050, crops that provide a large share of the global
population with most of their dietary zinc and iron will have significantly
reduced concentrations of those nutrients, according to a new study led byHarvard School of
Public Health(HSPH). Given that an estimated 2
billion people suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies—resulting in a loss of 63
million life years annually from malnutrition—the reduction in these nutrients
represents the most significanthealththreat ever shown to be associated withclimate change.

“This study is the first to resolve the question of whether
rising CO2 concentrations—which have been increasing steadily since the
Industrial Revolution—threaten human nutrition,” saidSamuel Myers, research scientist in the
Department of Environmental Health at HSPH and the study’s lead author. The
study appears online May 7 inNature.

Some previous studies of crops grown in greenhouses and
chambers at elevated CO2 had found nutrient reductions, but those studies were
criticized for using artificial growing conditions. Experiments using free air
carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) technology became the gold standard as FACE
allowed plants to be grown in open fields at elevated levels of CO2, but those
prior studies had small sample sizes and have been inconclusive.

The researchers analyzed data involving 41 cultivars
(genotypes) of grains and legumes from the C3 and C4 functional groups (plants
that use C3 and C4 carbon fixation) from seven different FACE locations in Japan, Australia
and the U.S.
The level of CO2 across all seven sites was in the range of 546 to 586 parts
per million (ppm). The researchers tested the nutrient concentrations of the
edible portions of wheat and rice (C3 grains), maize and sorghum (C4 grains),
and soybeans and field peas (C3 legumes).

The results showed a significant decrease in the
concentrations of zinc, iron and protein in C3grains. For example, zinc,
iron and protein concentrations in wheat grains grown at the FACE sites were
reduced by 9.3 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.3 percent, respectively, compared
with wheat grown at ambient CO2. Zinc and iron were also significantly reduced
in legumes; protein was not.

The finding that C3 grains and legumes lost iron and zinc
at elevated CO2 is significant. Myers and his colleagues estimate that 2
billion to 3 billion people around the world receive 70 percent or more of
their dietary zinc and/or iron from C3 crops, particularly in the developing
world, where deficiency of zinc and iron is already a major health concern.

C4 crops appeared to be less affected by higher CO2, which
is consistent with underlying plant physiology, as C4 plants concentrate CO2
inside the cell for photosynthesis, and thus they might be expected to be less
sensitive to extracellular changes in CO2 concentration.

The researchers were surprised to find that zinc and iron
varied substantially across cultivars of rice. That finding suggests that there
could be an opportunity to breed reduced sensitivity to the effect of elevated
CO2 into crop cultivars in the future.

In addition to efforts to reduce CO2emissions, breeding
cultivars with reduced sensitivity to CO2, biofortification of crops with iron
and zinc, and nutritional supplementation for populations most affected could
all play a role in reducing the human health impacts of these changes, said
Myers. “Humanity is conducting a global experiment by rapidly altering the
environmental conditions on the only habitable planet we know. As this
experiment unfolds, there will undoubtedly be many surprises. Finding out that
rising CO2 threatens human nutrition is one such surprise,” Myers said.

“We are the largest grassroots
population organization in the United
States.Population Connection, a 501(c)(3)
organization, has 140,000 members, supporters, ...

POPULATION CONNECTION, THE MAGAZINE OF THE
ORGANIZATION BY THE SAME NAME

JUNE
2014 NUMBER ON FOOD SCARCITY, “OUR AGRICULTRUAL FUTURE IN PERIL.”

Like Countdown, the
magazine is packed with striking statistics, for example: “Costs for voluntary contraception are
amazingly modest. Right now, the global
health community needs an additional $4 billion dollars a year to be able to
provide contraception to the 222 million women with a current unmet need. That’s equal to Coca-Cola’s annual marketing
budget or the value of the Internet music program Spotify.” This number includes “Our Last, Best Hope for
a Future on Earth?” by Weisman, “New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed
Civilizations” by Lester Brown, and “Famine Is a Feminist Issue” by Lisa
Palmer. –Dick

IPCC REPORT ON FOOD SECURITY

The March 2914 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change makes several significant predictions, among them:

--“Studies have documented a large negative sensitivity of crop
yields to extreme daytime temperatures around 30 Degree C”

--“Changes in temperature and precipitation, without considering
effects of C02, will contribute to increased global food prices by 2050, with
estimated increases ranging from 3-84 percent.”—Dick from PC p. 2.

--

·

We are made up of pro-choice women and men across the United States.
Together, we protect a woman's right to choose.

Make a contribution to support choice today. With your help we can
continue to protect reproductive rights.

$35.00$50.00$75.00$100.00other:

Donations secured by

PRO-CHOICE VOTER GUIDE

Find
out where candidates for Congress and governor stand on choice! Our voter guide
includes candidates for primary elections across the country.

Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented, and popularly
written refutation of the idea that “overpopulation” is a major cause of
environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only
misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement
for real solutions. No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so
clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for activists and
environmental scholars alike.

Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism, an online
journal focusing on capitalism, climate change, and the ecosocialist
alternative. His previous books includeCanadian Bolsheviksand The Global Fight for Climate Justice.

Simon Butler, a climate justice activist based
in Sydney, Australia, is coeditor ofGreen
Left Weekly, the country’s leading source of anticapitalist news,
analysis, discussion, an

Has
world population reached its limits?

Too Many People?

By Ian Angus and Simon Butler

Haymarket Books, 2011, £13.99

Reviewed by Bill Hopwood

ONE OF the major divisions within environmentalists
is on the issue of population and ‘overpopulation’, with many claiming that a
key cause of environmental damage is too many people. The British Royal
Society recently released a report, People and the Planet, which argued that,
to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills",
the world’s population needs to be stabilised. Ian Angus and Simon Butler’s
book, Too Many People, examines these claims and explores their implications.

On the surface, the argument is straightforward. All
other things being equal, more people will consume more food, need more
shelter, produce more waste. The world’s population has grown rapidly, from
two billion in 1927 to seven billion in 2012. At the same time, environmental
damage has increased significantly. So, the argument goes, too many people
are causing mounting environmental problems.

One of the most influential books to argue overpopulation
was The Population Bomb, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published in 1968. They
stated that there would be mass starvation as the world could not produce
enough food to feed the growing population, that even more people would die
from other environmental problems, and that both of these could be
"traced easily to too many people".

While the world’s population is growing, however,
the rate of growth is slowing. The key factor for population growth is the
total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of live births per women over
her life. According to the CIA, in 2012 Europe, China,
the US, Canada, Japan,
Australia, and almost all
of the former Soviet Union, have TFRs below
the replacement rate. There is a time lag before populations stabilise or
fall, as young females grow up. But several European countries, Japan and Russia already have declining
populations. The world’s population is still growing but the rate of growth
has halved since the 1950s.

Butler and Angus
dissect the claim that it is population that is driving environmental damage.
Globally, it would appear that growing population causes increasing CO2emissions. But low-income countries
have 52% of population growth and only 13% increase in CO2, while high-income
countries have 7% of population increases yet 29% of CO2releases. The claim that an
exploding population causes environmental damage is not supported by the
facts – it is simplistic.

There are different trends of populationists:
ranging from outright racists to those who try to combine advocating
population control with wider social issues and women’s rights. But
underlying all of these trends is a blaming of the poor, the biggest victims
of environmental damage. Paul Ehrlich admits that the idea of overpopulation
first struck him while in New Delhi, yet New York had a much
higher population density.

David Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First,
argued that in the US
anyone with more than two children should be denied welfare. His view of the
1986 Ethiopian famine was to "let nature seek its own balance, to let
the people just starve there". James Lovelock, author of the Gaia
theory, argues that the earth faces a "plague of people" and action
should be taken to prepare "those parts of the earth least likely to be
affected by adverse climate change as safe havens for a civilised
humanity", including naval action to exclude refugees – an odd form of
‘civilised’ action.

Garrett Hardin, author of widely quoted articles,
The Tragedy of the Commons and Lifeboat Ethics, describes pollution as due to
too many people "using the commons as a cesspool", and that
"it is unlikely that civilisation and dignity can survive everywhere,
but better in a few places than none. Fortunate minorities must act as
trustees of civilisation". He suggests that this is done by refusing
food aid to poor people outside the US and by stopping immigration to
these few islands of civilisation.

More moderate populationists urge voluntary
population control alongside social action, especially on women’s rights and
education. While seeming reasonable this still focuses on poor people. It
ignores the good reasons in some societies to have children. It delivers
often contradictory messages of population control and action for social
change. Most ‘voluntary’ population control programmes include some coercion
to get results: giving money to very poor people is exploiting their poverty.
Population control has resulted in 100 million missing women, due to
selective abortion and infanticide – hardly women-friendly results.

The best way to reduce the number of children, if
that is the desired aim, is to focus instead on women’s rights and education,
raise living standards, and provide a good welfare and pensions systems.
Smaller families are a by-product of these actions, yet governments around
the world, urged on by the major financial institutions, are doing the exact
opposite.

One of the commonly used ways of describing
environmental damage is I=PAT (impact = population x affluence x technology).
It looks like a formula, is simple, and seems to make sense. It is none of
these. There is no scientific basis or measurable units to this description.

It ignores who makes decisions about what technology
is developed and how it is used, what is produced and how, and who has power
to act. It assumes that all consumers in a country share equally in the
environmental damage. Greenpeace blamed all US car drivers for the Exxon
Valdez disaster. But consumers do not have any control over military
pollution, what technology is used to produce food, built-in obsolescence or
the consumption patterns of the rich.

The World Bank stated that the richest 1% of
humanity consumes 25% of the world’s resources and the richest 10% consume
59%. I=PAT totally ignores this, as do most populationists. This is the core
failing of their approach: they ignore class divisions.

Even if it was possible to democratically reduce
population, the time lag to even stabilise population is around 30 years –
far too long for action on climate change. The most modest assumptions set
the need to reduce CO2releases
by 50% of the 1990 levels by mid-century. No populationist seriously thinks
that population can be reduced to below three billion (half the world
population in 1990) in 40 years. And this assumes that if the population is
halved then pollution will also be halved – ignoring the consumption of the
rich and the pollution of industry and the military. Much of the
environmental damage in poor countries – logging, growing food for export or
extracting resources – is not controlled by the people there and gives them
little or no benefits. Populationists are blaming the wrong causes and, even
if their goals could be achieved, they will not have the hoped for results.

By blaming the poor for population growth and
working people in richer countries for consumption, populationists falsely
analyse the causes, avoid challenging the system, capitalism, and make it
harder to build the alliances needed to make real change.

Many of the most important struggles on the
environment are taking place in poorer countries with mobilisations of poor
people. Blaming them makes them less likely to be allies of environmentalists
in the richer countries. Most working people in the richer countries have had
stagnant living standards for decades and now face massive cuts in jobs,
wages, and public services. Blaming them will also not make them allies.

The answer to environmental damage does not lie with
the number of people. It lies with how production is organised, what
technology is used, how decisions are made and by whom, and how wealth and
goods are distributed. If all the available clean technology was used,
pollution and CO2releases
would be drastically reduced. Combining this with ending the excessive
consumption of the richest 1% and military waste would have a dramatic
impact. Alongside these, policies to provide good jobs and public services
for all would win overwhelming support and would tackle both environmental
damage and human wellbeing.

However, most populationists and many in the environmental
movements either do not want to overturn capitalism or do not believe it is
possible. Instead, they chase a dead-end policy of population control which
only allows the causes of environmental destruction to continue.

The authors have done a service in highlighting the
failings and dangers of focusing on population control. It is up to
socialists to continue to develop a programme and build campaigns to win most
of those concerned about the environment to a shared struggle with the poor
and working class of the world to end capitalism and create a society that
puts an equal priority on the wellbeing of humanity and the planet.

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